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HC3 Cloud Unity with Google Cloud Platform

Today we announced HC3 Cloud Unity℠, a new partnership with Google that has been two years in the making. Both companies have committed significant resources and technology to make this happen, and we’re super excited to announce it

So what is it? Simply put, HC3 Cloud Unity puts the resources on Google’s cloud onto your local LAN. It becomes a component in your infrastructure, addressable locally, which your applications can interoperate with in the exact same way they would with any local system.

The impact on operations is significant. For example, this takes the concept of cloud-based disaster recovery to a whole new level, because again, those cloud resources are part of the local LAN. This means the networking nightmare that is typically present in DR is gone, and an application which fails over to the cloud resource will retain the same IP address that it had before — and all the other systems, users, and applications will continue to communicate with the “failed” resource as though it never moved.

This also enables you to think about DR in a completely different way. Usually we think of DR as “site failure” — and certainly that could hold true here. But, in addition, we can now think of using this type of cloud-failover for individual apps and not necessarily entire sites. Again, since those apps failover into the same LAN, retaining IP addressing, they will work in either location.

Those are two concepts, simplified networking and DR, that we think customers will gain immediate benefit from. In addition, those examples should point you to something very new and exciting: true hybrid cloud. With everything on the same network, an application which may use several VMs can have those VMs spread across both their on-premises systems and the cloud, without any change in configuration or use. Furthermore, moving an application to the cloud is as simple as live migrating a VM between on-prem servers, because from a networking perspective, the cloud is “on prem.”

To accomplish this we have combined technology with Google, and both sides have also introduced new tech. On the Google side, this uses the resources of their cloud combined with newly launched nested virtualization technology. On the Scale side, we are using the HC3 platform with Hypercore and our SCRIBE SDS layers, and have now added SD-WAN capabilities to automatically bridge the networks together into the same LAN.

The end result, in-line with all Scale products, is extreme simplicity. These cloud resources are there on your LAN. Any VM can access them, use them, and move in or out of the cloud without reconfiguration or cloud awareness. We know our customers are often running a wide mix of workloads, some of which may be older, legacy systems. Whether old or new, these apps can now run in the cloud with a simple click in the UI.

When we first were approached by Google two years ago, we both immediately saw the similarities of our platforms and approaches. From KVM to software-defined storage, there was a lot that was already “in alignment” that enabled our platforms to work so seamlessly together.

Delivering this type of hybrid cloud functionality is the road we’ve been driving our customers down for a long time. From first coining the term “hyperconvergence” in 2012, to now bringing customers into this cloud-converged environment, we will continue to innovate to meet customer needs while maintaining the ease of use and interoperability that is fundamental to the Scale platform.